A Museum to Get Lost In, and How Israel Is Fixing It

An image of the gallery entrance planned for the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.Credit
James Carpenter Design Associates

JERUSALEM

THE Israel Museum is one of the finest in the Middle East — if you can figure out how to get in and find the art.

Founded in 1965 by Teddy Kollek, the long-serving Jerusalem mayor, to ensure that Israel would have a national museum of world rank, the museum was a vital symbol of the new nation. Mr. Kollek wanted, and got, “a modernist temple to culture” surrounded by other symbols of Israel’s modern statehood, like the Knesset, the Supreme Court and the National Library, said the museum’s director, James S. Snyder.

From ancient artifacts to contemporary art, the museum seeks to anchor the archaeology, material culture and ethnography of the world’s Jews within a broader global context, both Western and non-Western. It boasts a dominant site at the entrance to Jerusalem, a widely admired sculpture garden and, of course, the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Yet its entrance is an uninspiring parking lot and ugly ticketing building, and the portal to the actual exhibits is 270 yards away, requiring a hike up a hill, often in the blistering sun. It’s also hard to find your way from one collection to the next.

Mr. Snyder, who took over as director in 1997, sees the project as the solution to deep irritation over how the Israel Museum’s rich and varied collections — from the earliest known fragment of biblical text on a tiny silver amulet (seventh century B.C.) and sarcophagy to Islamic jewelry, major Impressionists and photography — seem almost to be hidden in a maze of different entryways. Yet the original architecture is itself an admired work of art that no one wanted to mar. As sketched out by Alfred Mansfeld and Dora Gad in the late 1950s, the museum was intended to resemble a low Arab village on the commanding hill that it occupies over Jerusalem.

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A rendering of changes at the Israel Museum, including, to the right, an entry pavilion.Credit
James Carpenter Design Associates

In a fiercely Modernist mode Mr. Mansfeld created a mathematical system in which low, square, flat-topped buildings, clad in Jerusalem limestone, sprawled in modules over the Hill of Tranquillity in much the way an Arab village grows around a set of courtyards.

The design is a classic of postwar Modernist structuralism, said Zvi Efrat, who is head of the School of Architecture at Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and whose firm worked on the current project. “Mansfeld created an organic, vernacular architecture that sits beautifully in the landscape but allowed growth without changing character,” he said.

The buildings, like the very idea of the museum itself, were part of the new country’s radical ambition of socialist humanism, a symbol of what Mr. Efrat calls “the heroic period” of Israeli architecture in the ’50’s and ’60s, when new public structures were forged for a new Zionist state.

But Mr. Mansfeld, who died in 2004, also had the somewhat pretentious idea of an Acropolis, with a hilltop entry reached only after a long, hot march up a central promenade of uneven stones, pavement and steps that rise nearly four stories to the summit. To find the galleries you must first negotiate a plaza and discern the entrance at the top. Even then you have to walk down a level.

It’s a lot of labor before you hit the art.

And then when you do, it’s easy to get lost. The current configuration confuses large numbers of the half-million or so people who visit the museum every year — down from nearly one million in 2000, before the violence of the latest Palestinian intifada. Back then about a third of the visitors were from Jerusalem, a third from the rest of Israel and a third foreign. Today foreigners still make up a third of the visitors, but more of the Israelis are from Jerusalem, since the city is still considered to be dangerous by other Israelis.

Museum officials are hoping that the renovation, to be completed by the end of 2009, will rationalize and simplify the experience for visitors. It might also help boost attendance.

The project involves about 80,000 square feet of new buildings and about 200,000 square feet of renovation and renewal, mostly in the galleries. The new buildings, airy but modest glass structures with ceramic louvers to deflect and tame the sun, are designed to respect the Mansfeld grid and aesthetic. But they will also provide a sense of transparency and illumination, especially at night, making the museum more welcoming.

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James S. Snyder, the museums director, in Isamu Noguchis sculpture garden.Credit
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

The new entrance will fit neatly into a block of the existing sprawl, about two-thirds of the way up the promenade. It not only will shorten the hike but will guide visitors to a central concourse from which all the main galleries can be reached, providing a clear sense of geography. The renovation incorporates a flat, climate-controlled path for those who cannot or choose not to take the old steep promenade.

Created by a partnership of James Carpenter Design Associates of New York and the Israeli firms of Efrat-Kowalsky Architects and Lerman Architects and Town Planners, the new design streamlines and unifies the museum without distorting or undermining the existing architecture. The new construction harnesses unused or underused spaces within the existing grid or tunnels beneath them.

The result is elegance without grandiosity, addressing what the museum lacked and needed.

Though perhaps less than ideally efficient, Mr. Mansfield’s museum has long been admired for the way it celebrated the local context of a new museum in a new country. Yet the museum is equally known for two other very different architectural approaches to Modernism: Isamu Noguchi’s sculpture garden and Armand P. Bartos and Frederick J. Kiesler’s Shrine of the Book, the breastlike building that encloses the Dead Sea Scrolls. Restored in 2004, the Kiesler building’s white dome and black basalt walls are supposed to symbolize the war between the Sons of Light and Sons of Darkness.

Mr. Snyder, 55, a former deputy director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is a specialist in museum design, having written a 1993 book with Joan Darragh called “Museum Design: Planning and Building for Art.”

He said the Mansfield architecture and the striking hilltop setting played into his decision to take the job. “But from the start I thought this needs reordering, renewing, redressing,” he said. “I’ve always been interested in what makes a museum venue strong and effective.”

In Mr. Snyder’s early years here, his major challenge was to persuade the museum to jettison an expansion that had already been designed, financed and approved. In what was an enormous controversy at the time he succeeded, and nearly a decade later he feels vindicated.

The old project would have involved adding a grand entrance and visitor center to the middle of the campus, breaking the Mansfeld pattern. When that design was finally dropped, the gift from the project’s main benefactor was revoked, meaning that the museum director would have to start from scratch in raising money for the new project.

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The museum includes a scale model of Jerusalem just before the destruction of the second temple in A.D. 70. Credit
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

“The years in which we struggled not to do the other project gave us time to think through how to do this one,” Mr. Snyder said.

In his view Mr. Mansfeld’s original concept, that “the museum would expand organically through the extension of these modular buildings around courtyards,” has essentially worked. The museum is 10 times larger than when it began, now covering some 500,000 square feet on a site of some 20 acres. “But it’s a challenge for the ordinary visitor trying to make his or her way through the campus,” Mr. Snyder said.

The task for the architects, he said, was “to order it differently and renew it and improve it — and recast the presentation of all the galleries, which are the heart of the museum.”

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“It’s about the journey and the arrival,” he said, “about architecture that clarifies how you move through a space.”

Mr. Carpenter, who designed the buildings, said he set out to make arrival, circulation and orientation clearer while respecting the architecture that was already there. “One of the confounding aspects of the original museum is the long walk up to the entry, and then when you’re in it, it’s confusing about where to go,” he said. “And then when you’re in an exhibit, how do you get out and into the next one?”

So he provided a “hierarchy” for the original sprawling design.

Mr. Carpenter, who is internationally known for his work with glass, including the cable-net glass wall at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan, focused on the north-south orientation of the campus. Given the harsh light of the Middle Eastern sun from the east and the west at various times of the day, he deployed thick extruded ceramic louvers on those facades. Fixed in place, the louvers refract the light to provide a soft, interior illumination.

Yet the buildings feel largely open. Much thinner louvers on the northern and southern faces allow visitors to look in, reinforcing a sense of activity and openness, both day and night.

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An aerial view of the proposed renovations.Credit
James Carpenter Design Associates

The architects also extended the promenade out to the street, Mr. Carpenter said, “so people would understand it as a route of invitation,” even from the parking lot. “Before, they were stuck with a closed campus and no obvious route of entry,” he said.

The new central concourse also allows museumgoers to make more logical connections, progressing historically, for example, from the ancient archaeology of the region through the Ottoman period, then to the Judaica and Ethnography collection describing Jewish life dispersed from the Holy Land.

Early regional art, beginning with biblical artifacts, will flow into the beginnings of Israeli art, which will feed into European works and then into the modern and contemporary galleries. New galleries will also allow the museum to double space for the display of 20th-century art, another strength of the collection. (A current show at the museum, “Surrealism and Beyond,” includes 300 works drawn solely from the museum’s collection, from Duchamp to Man Ray to Magritte and Picasso.)

Like most museum directors Mr. Snyder must do a lot of fund-raising. But for this project he wanted to create a new model of “collective philanthropy.”

Of the $80 million cost, roughly $60 million is coming from 14 private donors, families and foundations, two-thirds of them in the United States and Canada. “In America those are not big numbers,” Mr. Snyder said, “but here it is.”

The Israeli government is providing $12 million, and the Bronfman family is giving $10 million to renovate the archaeology wing. Unusually for Israel, whose tax structure does not offer generous American-style deductions for charitable giving, nearly $6 million comes from Israeli donors.

Much of the museum will remain open during the construction, which has just begun. Some permanent galleries will be shut for renovation, but highlights of the collection will be shown at the museum’s off-site locations like the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum and the Anna Ticho House.

For Mr. Efrat the new project enhances what he sees as “one of the best postwar buildings anywhere” without losing its main achievement: “an indigenous vernacular for the new Jewish state.”

Correction: August 19, 2007

An article last Sunday about the Israel Museum omitted the name of one designer of the Shrine of the Book. Frederick J. Kiesler designed it with Armand P. Bartos.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Museum to Get Lost In, And How Israel Is Fixing It. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe